Shia LaBeouf May Have Plagiarized His Apology for Plagiarism

Shia LaBoeuf in the Sigur Rós video "Fjögur Píanó"

The fallout from Shia LaBeouf’s plagiarism of Justin M. Damiano, a comic strip by renowned creator Daniel Clowes, continues today after LaBeouf took to Twitter to apologize for the whole affair. The only problem? The first tweet in his mea culpa also appears to have been plagiarized.

Last night on Twitter, LaBeouf wrote the following:

Copying isn’t particularly creative work. Being inspired by someone else’s idea to produce something new and different IS creative work.

If LaBeouf had hoped that these tweets would end the matter, then he hadn’t reckoned on a number of factors. For example, “[getting] lost in the creative process” doesn’t actually excuse the lack of credit given to Daniel Clowes, especially considering the amount of time and work required to bring HowardCantour.com from initial screenplay to completion. It also doesn’t address all the interviews where he answered numerous questions about the origins of the short movie afterwards without ever uttering the words, “Oh, I adapted it from a comic strip by Daniel Clowes, did I forget to mention that?”

More importantly, there’s the absolutely surreal, yet apparently true, revelation that this apology about plagiarism was itself plagiarized, as noticed by Andrew Hake on Twitter (and that LaBeouf has already been caught once before specifically plagiarizing an apology). Let’s look again at that first tweet, shall we?

Copying isn’t particularly creative work. Being inspired by someone else’s idea to produce something new and different IS creative work.

And now, let’s look at what “Lili,” a user on Yahoo! Answers, had to say about plagiarism four years ago. “Merely copying isn’t particularly creative work, though it’s useful as training and practice,” she wrote. “Being inspired by someone else’s idea to produce something new and different IS creative work, and it may even revolutionalize the ‘stolen’ concept.”

It’s at this point where you might be starting to wonder whether or not LaBeouf is purposefully trolling the Internet, or whether he just has a significant problem coming up with anything to say by himself.

For its part, Short of the Week, a website that had hosted HowardCantour.com before removing it yesterday afternoon as the plagiarism allegations emerged, told WIRED that it would consider returning the short to its site, but only under certain conditions.

“We were led to believe by Shia and the filmmaking team that the story and script for HowardCantour.com was completely original,” site editor-in-chief Andrew S. Allen explained via email. “This was a film that screened at Cannes and dozens of other festivals around the world for a year and a half with no outcry about the uncredited use of Daniel Clowes’ work. That didn’t come until it hit online. If it wasn’t for the legions of online Clowes fans, this may never have come to light.”

He went on: “As curators of a powerful but under-appreciated medium like short film where filmmakers spend years of work to make little or no money, the recognition you get from your work, and therefore attribution, is often all you have, so we take it seriously. Until Clowes grants permission and is credited in the work, we’ve pulled the film offline.”

Meanwhile on Twitter, users have come together with the tongue-in-cheek hashtag #shialaboeuffilms to offer some suggestions for future projects LaBoeuf could create that are also “inspired by someone else’s idea”: